


The Seal

by taran



Series: They say [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Feels, F/M, Gen, Genie Jaskier | Dandelion, I think?, M/M, Non-Human Jaskier | Dandelion, Re-imagining the first season, Relationships without hard labels, Slow Burn, Soft Magic, overuse of metaphors surrounding Fate and Destiny
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:01:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 19,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23622010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taran/pseuds/taran
Summary: They say there is a genie in the lake.* * *Geralt's companion is not who, or what, he had seemed to be. The events of season 1 viewed through a decidedly different lens.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii & Jaskier | Dandelion & Yennefer z Vengerbergu, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: They say [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1705699
Comments: 80
Kudos: 209





	1. Part 1: Summer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I woke up one morning last month, or perhaps the one before, and was completely overtaken by this idea. I rushed out of bed and sat typing out nearly 25 pages of this first chapter and the following plot, straight through to the final scene. It took 4 & 1/2 hours before I had everything down. I've been working on it ever since and have something like 80% of the fic done! Hopefully that will mean a speedier update time as I do the final editing.
> 
> I hope you all enjoy. I'm a little outside my comfort zone with this style, and with the soft magic as opposed to hard magic, and also the way this fic will be chaptered. With that in mind, any feedback and comments would be so appreciated. Thank you for reading! 
> 
> As a note: this fic is tagged as both gen and m/f & m/m, and you'll notice there's quite a lot happening in the relationships tags. I also don't know what is happening with that. Apologies.
> 
> Also, as you might have noticed, this story is the first in a series called "They say". At the moment, the series is planned to consist of any one-shots or fics following the timeline of this one, as well as other fairytale- or folklore-themed fics working with the idea of a magical or nonhuman Jaskier. But that's for another time-- on to The Seal!

*

They say there is a genie in the lake.

In the last hot gasp of a miserable summer Geralt pulls the net from the lake and the amphora from the net. He pulls the stopper from the jug. His hands shake. In the exhaustion-tinged rush of _finally_ , of _please, let it be,_ his grip tightens on old fired clay past what it can support. Shards pour out of his palm. 

He has not slept. He could not sleep. The days and nights of the past week have become a single, unbearable smear between blinks, and if in that unreality he breaks a jug, it can’t be as important as the lead seal that begins to shudder in his hand. He glances down at it and

 _“Finally,”_

exclaims the man at his side. He doesn’t even flinch when Geralt whips around, hand gone to his shoulder where, fuck, his sword doesn’t sit. It rests a few yards away down the shore where Geralt had started. The man watches the half-second of this pantomime with bright eyes, as bright as the fine silk of his jacket, done up in the glowing blue of an evening sky. Geralt’s head spins. He hadn’t heard him. _He_ hadn’t heard him.

“Who are you?” he growls. 

But the young man, unperturbed, continues as if he hadn’t spoken. He is looking at the shards at the toes of his fine boots. “You know, I didn’t think anyone would be finding that for ages. Really, who hides such a small jug in a lake? It’s like they didn’t want it found this century,” he ends in a cross mutter, eyes darting out across sun-spackled waters.

Geralt has little patience for fools, but less when he hasn’t seen the inside of his own eyelids in days. He looms closer, not terribly much taller but certainly bigger. He sees when those bright eyes lift and take that fact in.

“I asked you a question,” Geralt says, and he feels but cannot stop when his pupils contract just a moment. He knows how it makes his irises catch light and flash yellow in a way that has sent more than one peasant running. Blue eyes widen, take it in-- and the man grins.

“Those are lovely, aren’t they? I should hope they’re not why you’ve gone through all this trouble to find me,” and without a hint of fear he claps him gamely on the arm. 

Geralt freezes. Something creaks in his hand. When he looks it goes through him with a jolt what he had forgotten: the cracked lead seal, leaving a metallic graphite sheen on his palm that glistens green-purple like oil, like raven's feathers. He blinks, and finds that he doesn’t know how long he has looked, or how long the man buzzing at his elbow has babbled on, his voice as startling as the hand on his elbow.

“-really, not all the time one gets to meet an interesting fellow like yourself. I just can’t imagine what drew you out so far, unless the village has grown closer to the lake than last I recall--”

Geralt turns hard. The stranger has no choice but to take one and then two stumbling steps back, because Geralt has not slept and he cannot help but crack clay under his hands and flash eyes more animal than man and so backs him into a tree and growls, “Stop talking. _Now._ ”

“Right, yeah, of course, take me out someplace nice and then don’t even give me the air to stretch my lungs,” the man complains, completely unperturbed. He even has the audacity to roll his eyes. Geralt stares. He wants to ask what in the world he’s talking about-- no, that's a lie, what he really wants is to _sleep._ Regardless, he can’t seem to dig the words out.

__

__

The stranger has enough for the two of them, however. He looks Geralt over critically in a flash of curiosity and then, gazing about appreciatively as if his back is not pressed to rough bark and hard knots, he sighs, “Well, at least it is enough to be out in the sunlight and air. Gods, but look at that water-- late summer, I’d wager? Though to look at you I’d almost say dead of winter; not a hint of color to you, big strapping thing that you are. It’s really quite a shame. I mean, some do go for the ivory skin look. White hair, though--” he gives himself pause. Tongue bitten and simmering, Geralt feels his lip curl on that final cusp between confusion and real anger. He watches the stranger take in everything from his hair to the medallion on his chest in a moment. It is a familiar moment. He waits for fear and revulsion born from understanding. He is almost thankful for the thought of it, if it will mean the man leaves him to his business.

Of course, luck has never been on Geralt's side. Instead he sees nothing but the shift of interested, half-heard comprehension begin to burn in the man's face.

“And what,” the man asks, slower than he had before, "are you?" He tilts his head back as if he savors the words.

Geralt can't help but to stare. His chin is a jut of solid, boyhood mischief under full cheeks that make him appear even younger still. The dull foreboding that he will not be let alone any time soon drops down into Geralt's stomach. The man asks, “What is your name, then?” Then with shocking impetuousness, he reaches out as if to catch a flyaway white lock around one finger. Geralt jerks his head to the side and catches his wrist before he can. He knows his grip to be too hard yet cannot reel it in, and figures that clearly shows the situation has gone long enough.

“I don’t have time for this,” he huffs. He throws the man’s hand back at him and turns away to collect his discarded swords and armor. “Go back to the village.”

Mirth follows him. “Is that where you think I’m from?” Geralt grunts. The man chuckles. “Really? Unless a lot has changed since last I found myself there, I think you might need to look again. Quite a lot of Cidarian silk wandering around Lorham these days?” 

Geralt ignores him. All he can think of is the weight of the seal in his hand. The vagueness of exhaustion in his head. In his body, the unfamiliar brittleness that has dogged him and pushes him onward. He crouches down to his bandoleer, for not even exhaustion can make him abandon caution. He’ll chase the boy off, return to camp, and make his wishes there. The sun should be setting in the next two hours. Plenty of time to study the seal and to feed Roach. 

Then, hopefully, to sleep. The idea tempts him more than anything ever has, he thinks, in his whole life. More than food when he had starved and touch when he had been too long alone.

The skin all along Geralt’s right side prickles.

“You know,” the man says from barely an arm’s length away. He doesn’t so much as blink when Geralt jerks around with a curse to find him leant casually against a log as if he had always been there. He hadn’t heard a single movement. “I’d thought you would be more polite, considering.”

Geralt sneers at him. “Considering what?” 

In the rush of surprise tripping through him, something of the fog clears. With a sudden presence of mind Geralt takes in what he had not before. 

“Well,” the man hums. When he shifts, the fine silk of his doublet and trousers shimmers in the light. There is not a wrinkle, smudge, or tear to hint that he had had to make the same trek that Geralt had made through a mile and a quarter of humid, overgrown forest track. It is, he knows, the only way to the lake from Lorham, and Lorham the only village for days. “Considering all the effort you’ve gone through, really. By the look of you, you’ve been at it all afternoon,” and flutters a delicate hand at Geralt’s person: his sweat-soaked shirt, disheveled hair wisping and curling in the damp heat, the smell of sweat and horse that hangs around him. Geralt doesn’t need to look to take it in. 

Instead he observes the neat lay of dark hair on the man’s forehead, the barest flush in his cheeks and the sweat just beginning to bead on his lip at such odds with the crisp cool of his clothes. Even as Geralt looks, he reaches up to undo the top few buttons of his jacket, as if the heat had just reached him. Noticing his audience, he dimples one cheek coyly. “I hope you don’t mind. Improper, I know, especially given we’ve just now met and all.”

He pauses halfway, reaches a decision, and undoes the whole line of hooks. The undershirt revealed from beneath is an airy, lacy mess of misplaced funds.

It is completely untouched by sweat.

“Though please, don’t let me embarrass you,” blue silk adds magnanimously, taking Geralt's silence for something else. A flash of tongue wets his lips. He winks. “Of course, I’ve always found that a healthy flush and the sweat from a man’s work suits better than even the finest of _vêtements_. Would it be too bold to say that of the two of us, you look rather more— oh, yes?” 

For Geralt had slowly, unblinkingly afixed his kit across his chest as the man prattled on and tightened it, checking briefly that the hilt was at the right height to draw easily. Now he steps closer, breathing deep.

Lax limbed and terribly vulnerable where the long line of his neck curves up from the lace at his collarbones, the stranger watches him do it without a hint of trepidation. He simply cocks his head archly when Geralt crosses well out of polite and into personal space. Ignoring his heavy-lashed gaze nearly radiating interest, Geralt breathes deep again; a great drawing breath that by the way it rumbles in his chest could have come from a large animal and not a man. 

“Not that this isn’t terribly cozy,” hums the stranger, in such a way that corner of his mouth curls impishly up, “but you still haven’t told me your name. Am I to guess?”

Geralt ignores him. 

He smells algae and lake grasses and sweet hummus baking in the sun around them, pungently sweet. It battles with the sticky cloying musk of the forest a day after rain in the dry season. The first shower always sees all the trees releasing their oils to soak in as much water as possible. The scent is so strong that for a moment he almost feels dizzy.

From himself he smells sweat and horse and herbs, and leather and oil and old blood from his kit, and the bright tang of the lead seal in his hand. But there, underneath himself and his surroundings, he finds something else lingers: cool clay and deep waters and spiced wine and cedar; ozone like at the front of a lightning strike; mixed with something of the human in front of him and something of magic. He takes another step closer-- and the pendant against his chest begins to vibrate.

“What,” asks Geralt in a dangerous, slow-footed rumble, “are you?”

The man smiles with good humor that makes his eyes twinkle. Again he reaches a hand for that stray wisp of Geralt’s hair-- just so Geralt will grab his wrist again, or so the triumph in his face says. He chuckles despite the bruising hold.

“I asked first, you know,” he says. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll just have to find out for myself.”

Geralt pulls his lips back off his teeth in a much less friendly expression. The man nods as if he had spoken.

Geralt doesn’t understand. All he knows is what he has before him. A man who is not a man, a seal, and a broken jug. His head is thick with what feels like all the cotton wool in the kingdom. He has not slept. _He cannot sleep._

But what happens is this:

Geralt had broken the amphora in his grip as he had pulled the seal. He doesn’t know what this means, and won’t know, not until it happens- a decade in the past, seconds from now; before, after. 

What happens is that time flows for most people forward like a tidy little stream and does not diverge often or easily. It is not so for those things which exist outside it, in those pockets and places where the stream for some reason pools deep or turns sharply; in those places where time has forgotten to flow forward and might turn sideways, or backways, or perhaps does not flow at all. Places like the dark belly of a genie's amphora sunk to the bottom of a lake. Time flows, yes-- like water poured from a jug, when the jug is poured. 

But Geralt had broken the jug, and everything inside had rushed out between his fingers. Shards had fallen into the moss (and one, he will find later in camp, into one of his boots). And for all time does like to flow tidily, in this moment it is not at all well ordered. It spills out a chaotic, giddy mess, as things do tend to be when given their way. 

Given his own way, something mischievous and too curious for his own good-- something that had sat trapped in the little pool of stagnating time inside a genie’s flask-- might take such a chance to slip back not through a stream but amidst the sudden, unexpected scatter of shards. Given the chance, when time for just a moment runs not forward or even sideways but in all directions, he might take one long step through the unexpected scatter of nights and days and nights and days _and nights and days and days and nights and_

water from a broken bottle flows differently, just for a second, which is quite enough

\--enough so that sixteen years ago, Geralt meets a bard who wears a garish doublet slashed rakishly down the chest, red beneath stone-beaten blue. He is effusive and young in such a way that pricks, perhaps because he is so open and Geralt knows he will see him close tight like a slammed door when he realizes to what he speaks. 

Yet when Geralt glares and rumbles, his brightness doesn’t waver. The bard asks his name and when he doesn’t get it, he guesses (rightly). He doesn't turn away. 

He follows Geralt to find a devil who isn’t a devil, and babbles stupid things about elves and golden palaces, and of course it is then that the elves find them.

Geralt drags them out of the situation by the skin of his teeth-- or the skin of his neck where, for a moment, Filevandral’s blade had sat and assured him of his own death. Sixteen years in the past, _I’ve lived long enough for this,_ he thinks, _it’s for the best that I go alone_.

But he wasn’t alone, was he? Standing on the shore of a lake, Geralt had thought-- just for a moment, he thinks... 

But sixteen years before, 

the young bard’s shoulders had been sharp and warm against his back, not cold stone and empty air. He had felt the knobs of his spine when the elven woman had kicked him in his chest, rocking him back with a whimper that reminded Geralt just how young he was. Why had he thought-?

After the King of the Edge of the World lets them go, the bard follows. He cajoles. He pesters, just enough that Geralt becomes used to his presence. Which is of course when he leaves to Oxenfurt.

Alone again, Geralt travels. He vows to cure a cursed princess. He fights the striga with iron to keep from harming her, and nearly kills the human princess on his own desperate teeth. Like all men who have sought redemption, he finds it only tastes of blood.

Spring comes fifteen years ago, which turns to summer, and the bard finds him like a dryad’s arrow. In he walked through the crooked-hung door of the tavern, the boyish man Geralt was sure he would never see again, and made a sharp path for Geralt’s secluded corner. He smiled as if he had already known who he would find there. 

Geralt tries to chase him off. He would always try to chase him off those first few years. A witcher’s path was no place for a perfume-smelling troubadour. It did not matter that the times together run so much more smoothly, more warmly, that they pass sometimes softly and sometimes comfortably by like burnishing leather under a bone polisher, with the bard’s footsteps in his ears. It did not matter that the townsfolk opened like flowers to the bard’s warmth when their otherwise colorless, hard faces would turn away from Geralt himself. 

They traveled together, fifteen years ago. Fourteen. Thirteen. They parted. They met again. The world smoothed and warmed. They met. They parted.

The pattern continued for years, as simple and reliable as plaid cloth, together and apart, together and apart, until the bard had completed his training. With long-practiced mistrust Geralt had half expected that to be the last of him. Now a university trained troubadour with better prospects, that did not include stale bread breakfasts and a bedroll by a witcher’s fire, why should he stay? However, twelve years before a lakeside when Geralt suggests it-- on one night whilst they share a demijohn of too tart raspberry wine around their fire, not an unfamiliar pastime-- his companion makes an offended noise like an un-oiled hinge and sloshes wine down his chin.

“You, my friend, are a pessimist! Leave and quit my work now? Now, when I am finally trained and your tales are beginning to gain traction? For even suggesting it, you owe me another one of these as well as a cask of fine ale after our next success,” and at that he drains the demijohn dry with a puckishly red mouth. Next to the fire he smells of raspberries, of the sweat of a day of travel, and distantly, only for a moment, of deep waters and wine in a clay jug. 

On a lakeside near Lorham and a day from Rinde, the smell of it presses up and over his head, cool waters and wine in a clay pot, as if it pours out of the bright-eyed man like from a broken jug. The enormity of Geralt’s life for ten years swells up hot and dizzy and almost painful in his chest. Then it settles and smooths into a new shape, a hand brushing away the long, dusty expanse of loneliness stretched like an unwelcome road inside him. He almost tastes the grit of the highway in his throat because 

in the long years, there formed nights together around fires along the long road; in inns; in the odd hold or castle; in peasant's cottages and cow barns and stables. Even the nights alone were better for all the times when he was not. Familiar hands, a familiar voice, music on roads that had been long and quiet-- or, had they ever been

The amphora crunches beneath his boots. A lead seal grows hot in his hand. He thinks he dreams. He thinks his head dizzy with the heat and lack of sleep. Blue eyes watch his. He remembers

six years ago, a Cintran banquet that the Queen herself had invited him to. She dressed him in the false livery of a fake Lord and saw him seated at her side- but no. No, it had been

a bard who Geralt had long grown accustomed to finding-- around the furthest bend of a forest path or in a house of ill repute or in the lap of a beer-drunk Lord’s son or fishing for catfish in nothing but his trousers and a handkerchief in a Toussaint stream. It was always him. Each time he turns up like a bad copper. Should he still be so unexpected? His full-cheeked, boyish face which seems never to change. 

And why, Geralt thinks with abrupt disbelief, should a queen invite him to a banquet?

It was the bard who had sought him out and who had laughed at his dry stabs and rude grunts. He knew exactly which of his healing salves Geralt had needed worked into badly bruised muscles after a difficult fight against the selkiemore. The one that smells of chamomile and mint and can fade a bruise in hours.

It was the bard who played at the banquet and, when the princess came into her power as a Source, who Geralt saw throw himself bodily over a lady with whom he had been flirting when a battle broke out. He who found Geralt after the fighting and the broken curse and his fucking stupidity in claiming the Law of Surprise. He hadn’t said a word on destiny after Geralt had nearly slammed their room door off its hinges. He had simply helped work him out of the too-tight jacket and murmured a ramble of trivialities until they became a buzz of background noise.

They part. 

They meet. 

They part. 

They meet again.

Five years. Four, and three, and two. 

Geralt’s boots squelch in lake mud. Had squelched, not minutes earlier.

“Geralt! How’re you doing? What’s it been? Years, months? Ah, what is time anyway.”

With the seal in his hand, Geralt feels the air rush from his lungs.

“Jaskier.” 

The grin the man flashes at him-- _Jaskier_ \-- bright as birds. He preening brushes imaginary dust off his doublet.

But that’s not quite right. Geralt looks again. His cool, pressed silks are now rumpled in the summer heat. They are, he is shocked to see, smudged with lake muck from Geralt's hands where he had grabbed him. Had he? His head spins and rights all of once.

“You’re the genie,” he says dumbly. 

“Took you long enough,” Jaskier huffs with a laugh. 

It’s not that there is a rush of memories into him. They have always been there, even if he can remember a time minutes before when they had not been.

It is just that now, with his boots sinking into mud, with all the discovery of a man who turns into an unfamiliar room to find he has been there before, Geralt looks at him and with a sense like righting finds he is more himself now than he had been when he stood alone on the lakefront. Geralt is a man who has never trusted comfort a day in his life. Feeling it now, something cutting and awful spears through his chest.

“How?” Geralt demands. He sounds angry enough that Jaskier pauses in twinkling at him to glance him over. It is not the heavy-lidded look of before, flirtation and discovery, but familiarity. Somehow, that change only makes him angrier. 

He _knows_ Jaskier. He knows his voice, his mannerisms-- how he speaks with his gestures as much as his words, as if his head and hands were a three part act. He even knows his scent. Or thought he did, before the amphora had shattered. For a moment, he squeezes his eyes shut, overcome with vertigo. If the amphora had broken in his hand, if Jaskier had dropped it with almost inordinate glee. He breathes, and the air is laced so suddenly through with magic and ozone that Geralt feels he might sneeze. Jaskier has never smelt of anything other than human, sometimes linseed oil or beeswax, cedar or the herbs stored with his clothes. He can barely smell anything now beneath magic and clay. It sets his teeth on edge. He opens his eyes to glare.

“I was here alone, Jaskier," he snaps. "I found the amphora alone, I broke it-”

“-Until I did,” Jaskier agrees. Geralt cuts a hand through the air. 

“You’re human,” he says. Jaskier watches him unmovingly, nothing but the eyes. “You’ve always been human. I would have smelled it before, the moment we met. But now,” he breathes deep. Almost desperate for what his senses have told him to change.

It doesn’t. Geralt sneezes. 

Jaskier is shaking his head. “That was before. You hadn’t broken the amphora yet.”

“You broke it,” Geralt says, just to be contrary. 

Jaskier flashes a sharp, satisfied smile. “We could talk semantics all day, but- we both broke it, shall we say?” he offers equanimously. Geralt, who has already had a headache for days, feels it begin to throb behind his eyebrows. He can’t let it be.

“If you’re a djinn-”

“Genie!” Jaskier corrects.

“-then you were trapped in the amphora until I- we- _fuck,_ ” he spits, “until the seal came out and it broke. How could I have met you in Posada, then?” He boxes Jaskier in against the tree. It is not a terribly friendly move. He feels his pupils dilating, flashing again, as they had before Jaskier had known him, not five minute ago. Five minutes; sixteen years. Geralt’s heart is suddenly, inexplicably in his throat. He growls, “How, dammit?”

Within the cage of Geralt's arms, the suddenly cautious way Jaskier watches his face rests at odds the way he shrugs carelessly. “You broke the amphora,” he says slowly, like that means anything. Geralt continues to glower and stands unmoved when Jaskier pushes a testing hand against his shoulder. Jaskier rolls his eyes at him, like it will hide how tense he has become. “Time works differently inside it. When you broke the amphora, it…” He rakes his hand through his sweat-damp hair. “If this sphere is the bottle then time is the water that flows into it, and can pour back out. You broke the bottle completely. I just… took advantage, for a moment.” 

The absurdity of the statement leaves Geralt staring. 

“By going back sixteen years to meet me in the middle of nowhere.”

“You wouldn’t tell me your name!” Jaskier sniffs, irked.

“And then following me. For over a decade,” Geralt continues flatly. Jaskier grins into his hostile stare, a little manic.

It is, Geralt realizes with a jolt, the expression he often makes when waiting for the first punch. Last Geralt had seen it, Jaskier had turned it on a very drunk, very large man who had threatened him with a gelding behind a tavern, pressing him up against the outer wall.

In much the same way Geralt now has him against the tree. Almost without thinking why, Geralt takes a quick step back. Immediately Jaskier's entire body goes lank as if the strings have been cut. Only for a moment. Then he is casually looking away to brush down his jacket, like his busy hands it will hide it (and as if any amount of brushing down will save the soiled silk).

“Well, of course," he says cheerfully. "You were going to find the amphora eventually. And a bard needs a muse.”

Geralt opens his mouth, decides he does not have the energy to even begin to question that, and closes it promptly. Jaskier hesitates for a split second, but in the end claps him on the shoulder consolingly. He grins.

“Now what was that you said before? Something about not being able to sleep?”

*


	2. Chapter 2

*

The next day, Geralt awakens and finds that the seal has crumbled to sand in his bag.

But before that-- before he thinks of seals and contracts-- Geralt opens his eyes. Late-morning sunlight presses its humid hand heavily down on the camp amidst the tall humming grass of the clearing. Geralt lays with the profound sense that his muscles and bones have become warm honey. He groans. Summer insects buzz and drone in the surroundings. The sound leans on his ears, his head, pressing him back under until he drifts. For a moment his is stuporously content.

A familiar scent opens his eyes. Jaskier crouches next to him. He holds a waterskin in his hand.

“I was wondering when you would wake up. One likes to be appreciated, of course, but I was beginning to worry I had done my work too well. You’ll want to drink this.” 

Somewhat disgruntled, Geralt sits and puts back a swig of water. Immediately, he finds himself draining the skin dry. Another, full canteen replaces it before he can look to ask. Geralt drains that one, too. Next comes a spread of dried venison, smoked cheese, pickled cucumber, and traveler’s bread. He falls on it without a word, completely engrossed. He feels as if he had not eaten in days.

Jaskier keeps pressing things on him, quiet and watchful in an unfamiliar way. It’s only after he has drunk nearly his weight in water and dandelion tea, eaten through most of their remaining rations, and been handed fresh mint to chew on to do the final work of clearing his mouth that he speaks.

Directness has always been his way, and does him well enough now. “Why didn’t you grant my wish?”

Crouched as he is beside the tiny fire where he has the copper kettle bubbling again, Jaskier nearly tips into the coals. He hops back, swearing and swatting at the embers on his boots. He stutters as he does,

“OH, oh, I, ff, you!” No longer in danger of singeing and nearly incoherent with ire lands his fists on each hip and glares. “I’m so sorry! Did you not just sleep through to mid-afternoon, dear witcher?” Startled, Geralt checks the sun and finds he is right. Jaskier doesn’t pause for this revelation. “Should I have wiggled my fingers, flashed my eyes or some fangs, perhaps? Or provided a, a, a well-timed crack of thunder?” Amidst the offended symphony his hands are conducting, his own voice rising voice cracks.

Geralt has to draw his gaze from the familiar motions to examine his face, and has then to remind himself not to smile, that he is watching for a reason other than amusement.

“I don’t know. You’re the genie,” he says slowly and pointedly. “Should you have?” 

Jaskier sniffs. “You wished for rest and you got it. Look at you! Bed head like a archespore and dopey-eyed from sleeping nearly twenty hours. _Didn’t grant my wish,_ he says. Unbelievable…” Even as he begins to put together another steeping of tea, presumably for them both this time, he continues to grumble under his breath.

And Geralt… can’t really argue. Last night had been his first sleep in days. His first sleep lasting longer than two hours in weeks. And if in his entire life he had ever slept longer than 6 hours without being near death or completely sloshed, he can’t remember it.

He could mention the strangeness on the lakeside, already beginning to soften and fade like a new and uncomfortable tunic wearing down around the seams. He almost cannot remember what had unsettled him so, not in the warm heaviness of a well rested body. He could accusingly tell Jaskier of how, when they had arrived in camp last evening, there had been a wild, head-splitting moment where he had been both immediately startled to find a leather rucksack resting next to his own and had yet intimately recognized it-- down to the hand-mended bottom corner where it had torn three months before, and the front of which had been stained by cockatrice blood. He even remembers how it had happened. Jaskier’s shout, the flash of scales.

He could bring up the sudden presence of magic not just around Jaskier but in him. His pendant confirms it when he wanders over to the fire as if looking to check on the tea. Jaskier hands him his mug with an absent smile, thoughts obviously elsewhere.

Geralt could bring them back. All it would take is a question. 

He might address what Jaskier is, and who. Or ask for a better explanation of how they had met. He could even demand them, he thinks. He hadn’t had time to study the seal the night before, and the local folklore is typically vague. He has no idea the parameters of the contract binding them, outside of the time-honored prerequisite. Three wishes. 

The first of which Jaskier had granted, sans magic. Tea; a familiar voice humming; chamomile salve for his back and neck, and fingers in his hair. The speed and ease with which Jaskier had effectively sedated him into unconsciousness is nearly embarrassing. But not, at this point, surprising. Jaskier knows him. Geralt doesn’t want to ask, but…

He had made his wish with a tightness in his chest. He had hesitated for a long moment before because it was Jaskier. 

He had made the wish at last because it was Jaskier.

_"I want to sleep and_ rest _."_

Proof of what he was had come immediately. The ooze of magic out of him-- Geralt had never felt anything like it. Even with the memory blurred by sleep deprivation, it is enough to make him stare hard at the back of Jaskier’s neck as he works, humming to himself with his ire forgotten. 

(Geralt knows he is always like this. Spitting fire one moment, all forgiven and forgotten the next. He knows it well after over a dozen years, and yet... Yesterday he had been alone. For sixteen years, alone-- but yesterday, for just as many years, he had found he had never been alone.) 

Yesterday, Geralt had made the wish and Chaos like a human could never produce and control had answered it. Wind had tossed and played Jaskier’s dark hair around his face. He couldn’t remember now, standing in the afternoon light and gazing at the familiar line of his profile, how Jaskier had changed. He knew only that he had. Somehow. The smell of water and clay and ozone drowsy in his nose. Geralt had expected…

But then like a man wrapping tight an unruly spool of sheepgut strings sprung from their roll, Jaskier had frowningly twisted the outburst of magic back into order and tucked it away. Jaskier’s eyes returned to their human sheen. He did not glow in the moonlight, or hum with something older than the Continent, or any other things Geralt thinks might have happened but isn’t sure. He had swallowed hard, tilted his head, and clapped his hands with sweat stood out on his pallid face.

“Tea first, I think." 

Geralt had stared, shoulders tense with anticipation bleeding into confusion. It gave Jaskier time to look him over and nod. “And a massage, too. Do you still have that lovely chamomile salve? No matter, whatever you have will do, I’m sure. Come on, off you trot, you start the fire and I’ll lay out your bedroll. I’m not doing it all myself.” 

What could have Geralt done, in that situation, but obey?

“Hell- _o_?” A finger presses into his cheek. Geralt jerks back. “Perhaps I really did over do it. Are you in there, Geralt?”

“Jaskier,” Geralt snaps on principle alone. Jaskier grins and pours tea into the mug gripped lax and half-forgotten in his fingers.

“Ah, well, that answers that. Where shall we be going today, then?”

After a moment of conflict, Geralt grunts and pulls over to the fire the log he had been using as a seat the day before. “There are rumors of a noonwraith about six days north of here,” he begins. Jaskier plops down next to him, bumping their knees as he blows at his mug’s rim and sips. The casual touch makes everything between his knee and the top of his head prickle. Geralt doesn't know if it's magic, or just the closeness of having company. Familiar, unfamiliar... familiar. “They sound accurate enough that I almost believe someone there has seen one in the last ten years.”

“I’ll pack our bags,” Jaskier says, squinting up at the sky. “If we leave soon, we can at least spend the night in the village. You owe me an ale, I do believe.”

“When did you decide this?”

Jaskier gives him a shit eating grin. “Whilst you were snoozing and I was keeping your camp and nippy horse in order. Or perhaps when I worked the dozenth knot out of your hair with nothing but determination and ten over-tired fingers. Hard to say, really.”

Geralt hums. Jaskier takes it as an agreement and laughs, cuffs him on the shoulder, and hops up to begin packing. He spills his tea down his front as he does. Creative cursing ensues in-- Geralt counts them-- six languages. He finds he knows half of them from pure repetition alone.

Geralt doesn’t ask about wishes granted without magic, or about genies, or seals. He drinks his tea. It’s brewed too strong for his preferences but spot on for Jaskier’s, whose preferences he knows as well as his own and has complained about often. 

He smothers the fire and straps on his armor while Jaskier rolls their bedrolls. Roach affectionately tries to nip Jaskier’s hip as he attaches them to her saddle. The way he squeals says she gets her wish, too. Geralt listens as he blusters at her in the height of affront. It’s a reaction Geralt has heard a dozen times, from a man who never learns not to let her swing too close. He chuckles to himself and pushes the fading discomfiture from his mind to make room for the well-worn ritual of breaking camp together.

He finds a shard of the amphora in his boot half a mile into their trek back to town. 

They hadn’t returned to the lakefront. There hadn’t been a reason, for all Geralt might have thought to gather what was left of the amphora. The low sun convinces him to spend his time otherwise. For that reason it is the only piece of the amphora he has.

He doesn’t know why, but he keeps it. As if to chide him his bad decision, it slips from his grip as he stuffs it into his bag and leaves a short, deep cut on his forearm near the elbow. He is forced to bandage it as they move, cursing. 

It takes a long while to close. In the following weeks and months, the scar looks more like a scab than closed flesh. Sometimes, he bumps it open and it bleeds again as if fresh. 

It won’t close for years. Eventually, he will stop noticing it

But that is a discovery for later years. That night in the village, organizing his pack for the evening as Vesemir had trained them all, he makes a different discovery. He reaches for the seal, and finds only a fine powder in his hand. It blows through his fingers when he scoops it out, finer than stardust.

The smudge the seal had left on his palm remains. It does not wash off.

*


	3. Chapter 3

*

(Geralt’s first wish he made on the shore of the lake. He breathed the word rest with all the sanctity of a man who has forgotten what it tastes like. 

For a genie, a wish could never be understood painted in the mundane breath of something heard, the way one might hear a greeting or a name or a deathblow. 

For Jaskier, who heard the words even before Geralt spoke them, there came a terrible weight into his chest as he felt the very desperation and exhaustion that drove the man who now held his contract in one fist. The weight of an unslept week and sleepless months-- the weight of a lake pressed down over his head, into his lungs. The shape of Geralt’s wish wrapped him in its fist and _demanded._

It was with a jolt that in that moment he felt how he could twist the words into terrible shapes and meanings should he like. They trembled pale and delicate in him, malleable. _Simple._ He is a bard, after all, and words his greatest tools, weapons, and medicines. He would tell Geralt years later that he felt each wish as it formed behind his teeth, and in that moment he would not be lying. He would not tell him how it was his choice to breathe their intent out-- however he should like.

Geralt forms his wish, and potential scrabbles its greedy fingertips over Jaskier's ribs.

The spoken wish hits like a loosed arrow, zips in like a wasp to land right beneath his chin with implacability. 

"I want to sleep and _rest,_ " Geralt wishes, wildness in his eyes.

A genie is not meant to be able to choose. A genie cannot say no. A genie must grant the wish; even twisted, it must grant it.

Jaskier, however, was human long before. Choosing is what humans do best. 

Geralt’s first wish presses the burning brand of its shape-- desperation, exhaustion, the long search for rest of a long waking night-- presses it like a coal to the back of his throat. Does it hurt, he wonders, so that he might have no choice but to breathe out its magic?

Jaskier does not. He does what he should not be able to do, and swallows it down. 

He had stepped back through the stream of a broken amphora’s shards in search of a name. He had wandered through the decades to find a pale-faced, brooding man in a murky tavern at the edge of the world. Every earth known had pressed up against his boots; songs sung out under dark skies, bright skies, raining and dusking and sickly skies. 

The years still jostle old yet new in him when he presses the wish down until the last shocks of magic buzz only on his tongue. He does not need magic to grant this wish. He can grant it as a human would, he thinks fiercely. As Geralt’s friend of years, not as anything else.

So he took Geralt back to their camp. He helped him to wash in the nearby stream and combed aloe and apricot oil through his hair. With firm hands he pressed knots and pains out of the muscles of his back and neck, then fed him hot tea of mint and lavender from his pack that rested besides Geralt’s own as if it always has been there (and that is the trick of magic, because it had.) 

He hummed and caressed his friend into sleep, and that ember settled into his stomach, displeased.

He will carry the wish forward with him. A single moment of desperation swallowed, tinged with fear and shame and regret. 

He granted the wish, one way or another, so when Geralt's eyes finally closed the pain of it clawing at his gut subsides. It reaches, at most, an uneasy truce in his belly. Jaskier has more than enough familiarity with uneasy truces.

As evening staggered into night, Jaskier looked at Geralt’s sleeping form, and smiled.)


	4. Chapter 4

*

Geralt has known Jaskier over a decade. He has known him a day, a week, then a month. 

They go to find the noonwraith. After that, an infestation of echinops. On the way to the next village, Geralt kills a rabid wolf and finds a reward for it waiting on the town board. Things might have been utterly normal.

Might. Geralt carries the seal’s smudge on his palm, and when he cannot help it he puzzles, but doesn’t feel alarmed when he notices the little things about Jaskier that have always been there. It is as if they grow clearer, or Geralt's eyes have.

Jaskier is fearless. Geralt had taken it for foolish bravado for so long that seeing it now for what it is startles him. Jaskier isn't too stupid to run from a fight, or too optimistic to fear drowners and devourers. He is a man who knows nothing can hurt him. 

He never seems to tire; or bleed; or grow ill in winter. Falls that would injure a normal human he shakes off as stumbles, laughing, or blustering about the state of his trousers.

He always knows where to find Geralt, unerringly. Geralt finally understands why he could always count on finding him. He was never finding Jaskier at all; Jaskier was finding him. 

And then there are times when his eyes are More than blue or bright or shining.

Perhaps, Geralt thinks when he cannot escape it. Perhaps he should be worried. 

He dismisses it each time and purposefully goes back to forgetting. Jaskier is the same as he has ever been, even if he is not always believably human. That has to be enough.

A djinn is only a dark entity when it is caged, after all, and it’s like Jaskier said. Geralt broke the amphora.

*

Geralt breaks his arm a month after the lake with a sound like good firewood snapping, and it all goes to hell from there.

The griffin Geralt had been hired to hunt down is supposed to be the only one reported for leagues, which is why its 35 stone mate coming careening out of the brush without so much as a growl in warning takes him by surprise. Beneath its massive paws, Geralt shoves and just manages to roll out from the space where its bear-trap beak snaps shut, close enough that it makes his ear ring. The life-saving reaction has the additional side-effect of jostling his arm beneath him. Geralt grits his teeth and, powering through the wash of grey overtaking his vision through force of will alone, manages to scramble away before the thing can take a second shot at bisecting him with a single bite.

It is once he has clawed his way back to his feet, the world spinning sickly when he feels his hand swing wrong that Geralt remembers Jaskier. Rather, he remembers him because his voice rings out too close and too loud, 

“Geralt!”

They had argued earlier, Geralt with his first real job in weeks and Jaskier with his insistence that he be allowed to come along. A well-worn and over-familiar quarrel of theirs, made new by Jaskier’s abrupt reminder, “Oh, come on, it’s not as if they can hurt me! All-powerful magical entity, remember?”

Geralt hadn’t-- well, he had remembered, but he also had been pointedly not looking at the knowledge that existed now permanently within his peripheral. He had _known_ , but he hadn’t _remembered_ , because he hadn’t thought of the implications. Had, in fact, not thought about them with all the energy he could muster this past month.

So perhaps Geralt can be forgiven when he sees Jaskier now in nothing but somewhat travel-dulled blue silk throwing himself from behind a shielding oak to dive for his side, and shouts, “Stay back!” 

Can perhaps be excused by the sight of soft human skin and limbs and in fact the smell of him, too, pungent with acrid fear sweat and adrenaline. He lunges forward on the grooves of decades-trained instinct and his one working arm swings the sword up when the large griffin spots the easy prey and dives.

Geralt knows as he does it that he won’t be strong enough one-handed to hold it back. It will likely drive his own sword into his chest right alongside its beak. It is a killing kind of blow. 

But he also knows, down to his guts in an instant reaction that is pure adrenaline, that it is better him than the bard. Because Geralt has yet to think of him as anything other than that, _Jaskier the bard, the human_. Geralt has traveled a month with a man who is not a man at all yet who gives every sign and scent of humanity, and it is because of this that Geralt could willingly forget that much easier. A man who snores little whistling sounds at night, who drinks too much at times, who complains when his shoes pinch. That is how Geralt knows him, and so he does as his instincts demand and puts his trained body in front of his companion's like the shield it could be, just once.

Except in the split second it takes the griffin to reach them, Geralt’s amulet jumps up at his throat. 

A blast of magic roars around Geralt’s body like a gale and tosses the griffin back. It hits the cliff side 20 yards away with such force that whole chunks and boulders come crashing down around its limp body as it falls, and lays still. Hands grab for his arms.

“Geralt! Geralt-”

Gone is Jaskier’s scent. With his breaths still ragged from the fight and the pain pushing its way through the effects of the potion, all Geralt can smell is the earthy cold of clay sliding down his throat, the warm perfume of grass in the summer sun, and pure deep water. Transport spells always leave him dizzy; dizzy now, Gealt is almost sure he has been transported back to the lake near Lorham. 

But when he turns, there is no squelch of lake muck under his boots, and the ringing in his ears is not cicadas. Geralt staggers about and finds Jaskier there, as he has never seen him.

His senses tell him something larger than him stands there. With his arm hanging at a awkward angle against his side, Geralt finds himself suddenly aware that Jaskier is Other. His fight-addled, adrenaline-high brain tries to find what it is. Perhaps his skin glows and burns with a white-blue light like if water could be fire, or fire could be stars, or a man were more than a man with sunlight a caught firefly in his eyes. Jaskier smells of all the open air and still water of the lake. Looking at him now, Geralt is sure that should he reach out his skin will be as cool and perfect and unliving as sculpted clay. Just the sight of him, his unfamiliarly smooth and unyielding face, the More that lurks within his eyes, the buzz of air around him, Geralt’s amulet jerking like a frightened dog on its chain-- every hair along Geralt’s neck raises.

Jaskier glances over Geralt's shoulder at the griffin just long enough to be sure it does not rise. Then he sighs and the Otherness flows out of him on his breath, and his eyes light familiar and human and frantic on Geralt's face.

“Are you alright?” The hands he flashes out to grab at Geralt’s upper-arms are cool, but not cold and clay-like. They have familiar callouses. Some unrealized part of him relaxes at the confirmation.

Jaskier spends exactly one breath glancing concerned over Geralt’s arm before his gaze flashes up and pins him in place, furious like a flip has switched. “You fucking lackwit, what did you do that for!” he exclaims.

Geralt bristles. “What?” His voice comes out a growl, still hyped as he is with the fight. 

“That!” Jaskier cries, artless with anger. “Jumping out in front of me like a huge, stupid- moron!” He throws his arms out wide for emphasis and shouts, “I was fine!”

“It was coming right at you,” Geralt snaps, perhaps a little needled that Jaskier doesn’t seem even slightly grateful. “This is why I wanted to leave you at the inn. If that griffin had reached you-”

“I WOULD HAVE BEEN FINE,” Jaskier bellows straight from his belly. It is such an unexpected tone that it stops Geralt dead. Jaskier shoves against his chest as if his blank stare offends just as much as his ire. “I’m! A! Bloody! Genie!” He punctuates each word with another shove. They are so light Geralt doesn’t even have to take a step back.

“What-”

“I’m immortal, you idiot! No blade or beast, sickness or poison can harm me! I would have been _fine,_ ” and he finally pushes hard enough that Geralt jostles back a step.

Unfortunately for him, it also jostles his arm. Geralt hisses before he can suppress it and curls over it just a fraction like a hurt animal. It isn’t a reaction he wants to show anyone, not even Jaskier. Hot humiliation flashes through his chest.

Immediately, all the anger goes out of Jaskier’s face and posture. He pales.

“Oh, shit, I didn’t mean-- that looks awful,” he groans, which belies the fact that he immediately steps forward and reaches out with delicate hands to steady the limb under his questing gaze. There is visible bone, and quite a bit of blood. He swallows audibly. “Shit, Geralt,” he says again. "We need to get you to a healer, quickly." Geralt grunts an agreeing noise, still curled tight.

“Nasty break, but clean,” is all he says and, finally, is able to straighten. Jaskier gives him a frank look that says how little he believes that. Geralt wishes he would pretend, if just for a moment. The waning adrenaline and mounting pain shows through in his voice as stress; and is also probably why he blurts out, “Can you heal it?”

Jaskier gawps as if he has just asked him to kiss it better. “Excuse me?”

“Like what you did with the griffin. With magic,” Geralt clarifies haltingly, suddenly uncomfortable. Jaskier’s incredulous gaze softens, just a moment, before he grins wryly. Geralt instantly knows he is going to be teased and groans.

“Wouldn’t you like that?” Jaskier lilts obnoxiously. “And wouldn’t I, too, so I won’t have to listen to your sighing and grunting and complaining for the next week while this heals.”

Geralt glares. “I don’t complain.”

Jskier ignores him blithely. “I’m afraid I can’t do a thing about this. Not unless you want to make it a wish,” he doesn't ask.

Geralt stands in unmoving silence a whole ten seconds. Jaskier nods, proven correct. Perhaps sensing that Geralt is working up to something, he waits and is rewarded when Geralt begins haltingly,

“I… if I didn’t wish for your help, with the griffin… How is it you-?” he goes to motion with his free arm only to realize it still clutches his sword. Jaskier understands anyway.

All good humor flees him as if a switch were flipped. “It was going to kill you,” he says quietly. The hands holding his own, presumably to keep from moving the broken bone further, have gone icy cold. He doesn’t blink away from Geralt’s eyes. “I could feel it. Gods above, do you know what that felt like? Growing in my chest? The moment you moved, it was there. The magic just,” he searches, “well, poured out of me, if you’ll excuse the overused imagery. Though I do want it known I’ve never liked that phrase as a literary trope-

There are very few times when Geralt thinks Jaskier's rambling is appropriate; now is most definitely not one of them. “Jaskier.”

Under Geralt’s look he deflates. “-but anyway, that’s essentially what happened,” he ends awkwardly. 

Geralt is silent. Jaskier hears his question.

“It’s the contract. Until you’ve made your three wishes, I and my magic are bound to protect your life when it is endangered.”

“And yourself?” It is the first question Geralt has really verbalized in full, which maybe excuses Jaskier when he jumps.

Startled doe eyes. “What?”

“Does the contract allow you-" he stumbles, and finally demands, "can you protect yourself the same way?”

Slowly, a sticky warm smile spreads like honey into the creases of Jaskier’s flushed cheeks. Geralt has seen him smile and flirt and charm in every mood and setting possible; seen him smile at lords, washerwomen, bakers, candlestick makers. But this is one Geralt has never seen. He takes it in with silent surprise, just for a moment. Then Jaskier looks pointedly away and clears his throat.

He busies himself pulling a clean roll of bandages from his bag. With false heat as if he isn’t beaming, he says to the air, “I don’t need to, you twat, weren’t you listening?” It doesn’t work; he looks back, and his pinched mouth still smiles. Geralt swallows, and Jaskier blusters on as if nothing had happened, hands working diligently to wrap the wound, “No, nevermind, I know the answer. Now come on, let’s get this splinted.”

Jaskier unnecessarily leads him back to the inn (“My head and legs weren’t hurt, Jaskier, I know where-”) and by the firelight of the common later, once they’ve bathed and he has played; once they've found a mage to heal Geralt's arm and drive off infection, and they’ve had their dinners; after all of that, Jaskier smells of warm cedar and resin. And, when they split the wine from a well-aged glass bottle, he smells also of wine, if only wine from a clay jug. It is, he finds, enough for Geralt to go back to his forgetting, if only for a little while longer. Always for a little while longer.

*


	5. Chapter 5

*

It is Jaskier who cannot forget what lives inside him. 

The little tangle of rest rocks itself against his ribs and hums to itself, content to dream where it has settled without paining him further. He makes sure Geralt sleeps well, when he can. The wish need never press up again into his throat, not if Jaskier sees to it. 

Geralt spoke it months and months ago. After that first hard-won vulnerability, he doesn’t seem inclined to voice a single other wish. Jaskier finds he does not mind. The amphora is broken, he thinks fiercely; there is nowhere left to trap him. And all the tales say a genie is freed when the final wish is made. But where would he go? He wonders it as he looks at Geralt’s back, swaying ahead of him atop Roach as they leave town for the next village, and dreads the answer. The only answer is not to think of it.

Jaskier had never forgotten what he was before Geralt found the amphora. It had kept him drawn back like muscle off bone, afraid to relax, to settle, to soften, for all he had done so in increments. Completely unwilling, of course. It's just that... Nothing could have prepared him for the witcher who helped people and, yes, always got his pay, except for when he _didn't_. A witcher who so subtly flinched when children shied from him and people turned their backs to the bad luck he carried. Geralt wanted so badly for Jaskier to believe him. _Witchers don't feel emotions. We care only about the job._ Almost as badly as he wanted to believe himself.

When Geralt found Lorham and its little local legend about the lake, Jaskier felt it in his bones as a blown horn. Every part of him had been called. The Lady de Stael had been sad to see him go. What she hadn't seen was the single stride that carried him over four towns. He had not felt so much magic in years, regardless the direction they ran in, forward or backwards. Every shape and law of the world had demanded he be there. The magic made it so. One stride and two, with entire kingdoms passed beneath his heels.

He found the lake. Time always brought him back to the lake.

He had drained his hip flask as a man might have, if only because he could. His final moments as a man in the eyes of the man who mattered most to him. On the lake shore a second time, he felt the untidy wrinkles of time ribboned up around them finally smoothing out again, his old silk doublet on his back and his breath caught like it was squeezed into a small bottle. Geralt looked as he remembered; remembers; knows. Geralt knows him less, then, with 16 years between them, than he would the moment the amphora broke. As if those years were nothing compared to the truth of what he was.

It broke. Jaskier dreams it still, months later, and wakes up grinning in victory.

Geralt adjusted admirably to Jaskier's being a genie, all things considered. Well, still adjusts, sometimes visibly when Jaskier startles him.

Geralt doesn't want to make his wishes. Jaskier doesn’t want Geralt to make his wishes. Not now, not really. Why end their years together when there is so much more to see, of the world and of a single man? But there niggles in his heart that tiniest displeasure. The same displeasure that had driven him to find an amphora and pluck the seal out with the grandest of wishes on his tongue. Julian Alfred Pankratz had wanted at his very core to be free. Jaskier feels it still, even so many years removed from that idiot boy. A desire. To be who he was before the djinn and the damned amphora had taken his life from him.

But that’s not right, is it? Who he was before hadn’t known Geralt. The young man who had dreamed of fame and riches hadn’t had their nights and days together, or even the times apart, when the world was wide and burning alive and Jaskier felt giddy with the things he could see and do and experience. The wonders of the Continent always underlined with the suspense of when he might next see that black figure so familiar that no distance or fog or crowd could make him mistake it.

Maybe that is why Jaskier had kept the magic of that first wish, asleep always in his breath. Maybe that is why he doesn’t let it go. If there is never a first wish, then there can never be a last. They might continue on as they have, and the moon may never set and the North wind never blow the endless summer away. Jaskier will live a dozen lifetimes with his greatest of friends, as the companion of a witcher who would die for a human but here does not have to. It could be enough, he thinks every night those first few months, and does not think of freedom.

And what of the needs of a man?

And what of the things he had dreamt?

"And yourself?" Geralt had asked him. Jaskier had wanted to smack him. Hadn't he just explained nothing could harm him? It was a silly, no, a stupid question!

It matters that he cared to ask. Perhaps, even with the wishes made and unmade crowding inside him and between them. Perhaps Jaskier can still be a man, if Geralt will let him. _Because_ Geralt will let him.

*


	6. Chapter 6

*

Three weeks after the griffin, when Geralt has finished pretending to not watch Jaskier eat and drink as if looking for a hint of his power beneath his skin, they go up to sleep. The room they buy at the inn has a bed broader than either of them is used to. The mattress is new; new enough that there is no dip in the middle and their shoulders and hips crinkle the grain stalks down into a cradle of comfort beneath the sacking.

Geralt is quiet. It would not be unusual, if Jaskier did not know him better.

The weeks had passed tensely after Jaskier saved him from the griffin. After the healer, he ate his dinner in silence. He did not comment on the strength of the house ale. Even the size of the bath had garnered not even the approving rise of his brow and the deep-chested, "Hmm," of content. Jaskier had not complained that he took the first bath, and Geralt had not marveled. That was when he knew something had come into the witcher's mind.

Sharing the bed as they are now, all it takes is the barest shift for Jaskier to turn on his back and glance at his profile in the bare moonlight from the window. It is quite easy to tell when Geralt is still awake; his eyes reflect light.

"Correct me if I wrong, rare as it is," Jaskier starts. Geralt doesn't blink. "But even of your own record, you've been quiet." He doesn't mention the month of such bitten-off silences. If Geralt had watched him more than was his usual, and pretended past his ability that he had not and everything was normal. If he had not slept as close around the fire, or hesitated to speak his mind where before he had dispensed offense without a care. Nothing so close. Jaskier looks at him, and plucks across his words carefully. "What could have caught the tongue of the mighty White Wolf, I wonder? Nothing so mundane as a cat."

Geralt snorts, and is silent for a long time. Jaskier blinks long blinks, struggling valiantly against sleep as the moon creeps. Funny, at times, that the contract had left him this. To sleep as all men do.

"I'm sorry."

Jaskier is wide awake.

"Excuse me?" he chokes.

"I... before. With the griffin." He sounds pained. He clears his throat. "The contract-" a zing of shock goes through Jaskier at its mention, the first time Geralt has said it- "forces you to protect me. Yet you can't protect yourself the same way."

It is not pain that twists his voice, Jaskier realizes, and sits upright. It's guilt. Seeing his movement, Geralt sits up as well, face wary in the half light. As if he expects-- Jaskier's human heart pounds hard-- as if he expects Jaskier to lash out. 

"Is this why you've been watching me?"

"I haven't-"

"Bollocks. You'd think I was a pot and you the impatient scullery maid waiting for me to boil." Realization dawns. "And that's why you wouldn't let me come along on this last job. The contract." Geralt had stood firm against all of his needling and reasoning over nothing more than a pack of alghouls. He had come back with a gash the length of Jaskier's forearm on his side. And for what? Because he didn't want Jaskier to-- to protect him with magic? Except Geralt has that wincing, guilty look as if he cannot meet Jaskier's eye, his mouth hard as granite.

"I never wanted to force you-" Geralt begins.

" _Idiot._ " Jaskier grabs him by the chain gleaming on his chest and wraps it around his fist. Geralt's eyes widen to gold platters; the amulet jumps and jigs against his hand as Jaskier yanks him a breath closer so that he can be sure they see each other clearly. He snaps, "Let me be very clear, since you are too short-witted to find your way there on your own. You are my _friend_. The contract does not force me to protect you, it _allows_ me to."

"You said-" 

"If all I had were a stick and not a spit of magic, still I would have tried." Geralt's jaw snaps shut. "Finally beginning to get through to you, am I?" Jaskier snarks, and releases him only because he realizes how tight he had been gripping.

"...I don't like it." Geralt pins him with a too-soft glance when he turns to snip at him. "That you cannot do for your own safety what you must do for mine."

Jaskier lays back against his pillow without another word. Straw prickles against his back. He hears Geralt lay down next to him.

After a few minutes of silence have passed, Jaskier sighs.

"Perhaps I shouldn't have gone back so far to meet you." Geralt sits upright again, scowling. Jaskier stays on his back, his throat and chest vulnerable where he has stretched out. He holds Geralt's frozen gaze; it visibly stops the argument until he only holds it in his mouth. "You still think of me as a human, Geralt. That's why you jumped in front of the griffin. And you can't do that. Not to yourself, and not to me.

"I don't need to be protected. Not from griffins, not alghouls. Not anything."

Geralt looks at him a moment longer, eyes inscrutable, before he lays down and doesn't argue with him further for all he radiates unhappiness. 

Jaskier has gotten what he wanted. He doesn't feel as if he has won anything. They lay in silence for the rest of he night. Jaskier tries to pretend that Geralt is sleep. Geralt tries to pretend the same. Geralt's guilt lays on the bed between them.

*

Neither of them mention the conversation again. Geralt takes Jaskier with him on his next hunt, and complains the whole way that Jaskier is too loud.

After a few such hunts and one very foolish bruxa that mistakes Jaskier for an easy target, he doesn't try to argue any longer for Jaskier's safety to stay behind. 

He does, however, accuse Jaskier of not having a single stealthy bone in his body. Their arguments still largely end with Jaskier coming along. 

Life on the road goes on, with all the ease of a well-worn lie one repeats in the middle of the night. _Nothing will change,_ one of them thinks. Either one. _It doesn't need to ever change._

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you everyone reading and hanging with me so far! After this chapter is gonna be a much longer one that I am So Excited To Share With Y'all.
> 
> I'm a little unsure when it comes to this kind of story with its soft magic and soft timeline, and its more fairytale tilt in tone that I'm trying for. Even if it is great fun to write, I'm always anxious I'm not effective at writing it, or it doesn't come off as cleanly or clearly. Please let me know what you think! 
> 
> Thank you everyone who has already left comments already! Your excitement and enthusiasm gives me confidence and I so appreciate it C':


	7. Part 2: Autumn

A year after they met on the lake, 

(sixteen years after they met in Posada,)

there comes a stroke of ill luck to prove Jaskier wrong. 

Geralt never rides with a bleeding friend on horseback into the mayor’s manor where Yennefer of Vengerberg in her boredom and banked-bonfire rage has taken up residence tormenting its townsfolk. What happens instead is this: 

Destiny has its ideas, as all those who weave do. And as is the way of all artists who have the lofty dignity of a project few others could pull off, Destiny is jealous of its plan as it pulls and tugs the strings, lays the weft, guides the shuttle. Is it arrogance? Arrogance is a mortal creation. 

Or, so most would say who have never met a djinn or spoken with a genie. To know one is to know quite quickly what true arrogance is. For besides Destiny, genies and djinn are some of the few able to lay hands on the strings as they are woven. 

One day, a bard made a wish- he made three, in fact- and a string was cut and knotted where it shouldn’t have. Destiny, fate, whatever name mortals lend; the One At The Loom never liked that. 

One day, a witcher finds an amphora and makes a wish, and the strings come together again, though in a different shape than Destiny had wanted to find under hand. Only a genie makes such knots. Only a genie can nudge them wrong or nudge them right, if Destiny is unwilling to pull the thread themself. 

No one should want that Destiny pull the thread. The fall of Cintra is a pulled thread.

But that does not come yet. What comes is that where a genie who was a human might never age or die on a blade, they are still a thing of magic and might be harmed by magic, if it be the right shape. What happens is that shuttles might jump or slip but they always ride smoothly on the threads, and while the shuttle may have jumped, where it lands the witcher runs smoothly on his course. He runs on the right threads.

Jaskier leaps in front of a spell meant for Geralt. He swallows the curse and goes down choking on his own blood. 

Geralt has never seen him bleed, not in seventeen years. 

Geralt kills the hedgemage and runs.

It is the entire night and half the morning to get the both of them to a nearby healer and then directed to the villa at the edge of town. By the time Geralt has them riding through the gate, Jaskier is past delirious. Geralt had had him ride in front. When Jaskier began to slide from the saddle part way through the night, he was glad for it as he wrenched him back upright. In the stark morning light, seeing the lines of dried blood streaking down Roach’s withers where Jaskier had been slumped, Geralt is anything but grateful.

The right threads. It can only be Yennefer of Vengerberg’s house where they go calling. They, of course, will not know this until later.

The woman who strides out to meet them, streaming black glossy hair like a comet, snaps, “What do you think you’re doing-” and stops short a few meters away. 

Slumped against Geralt’s arm, Jaskier is not only pale and choking on blood, though he is that. Magic pools trapped with the blood in his throat. It shines through the thin skin there like a white sun. The precise fury shifts in the woman-- the mage. She catches the magic on the air like a scenting hound and folds her interest up like a parchment and slips it up her sleeve. “Nasty,” is all she says, mildly, clasping her hands before her.

Geralt has no time for games. Where Jaskier’s skin has always been cool as lake water, now magic buzzes beneath it and he burns like with a fever. Geralt has never even seen him ill with so much as a cold. He snaps,

“Are you the mage?” 

“Yes.” She looks him slowly from top to toe. It makes his teeth clench. “And you are…?”

“A witcher,” he says shortly. When she lifts an arch brow and goes to speak, he cuts her off brusquely. “My companion was hit with a spell. Heal him and I’ll pay you.” 

“How much?”

“Anything.”

Yennefer watches him with shrewd eyes as he has to shift Jaskier’s weight further up his hip. He is nearly insensate; the arm he has clenched around Geralt’s waist is limp, and his head lolls. After an unnecessarily long pause that has Geralt grinding his teeth, she nods just perceptibly and tilts her head towards the entrance.

“Up the stairs, second door to the left. Lay him on the bed.” 

Geralt strides past her without another glance. The marble stairs prove a problem. Geralt only pauses long enough to get Jaskier over his shoulders. The man is damningly silent about the treatment.

Her instructions lead him to a spacious south-facing room whose fur- and rug-lined floors and distinct scent of lilacs and gooseberries tell him it can only be hers. He has no time to take in the ostentatious finery. He rushes to the bed and gets a knee up on it to let Jaskier down with something like gentleness. He still wheezes and groans when he lands. Blood bubbles down his chin. For just a moment, a sliver of blue flashes up at Geralt through damp lashes.

Before he can shout for their benefactor, a hard hand presses him coolly aside. “I need space,” she snaps and leans closer. Geralt looks; Jaskier’s eyes are closed again. Begrudgingly, directed by a wintery glance, he moves to hover at the foot of the bed. 

She lays a hand across Jaskier’s throat and reels back as if slapped. Shock flashes across her features. She whirls on him.

“What is he?” Something has seized Geralt’s tongue. When he cannot answer, she storms into his space. “What have you brought into my tower?” she accuses. Geralt founders under her gaze. Her eyes are violet and furious.

“I told you--”

“Yes, a spell on your companion,” she sneers. “You never said anything about what he is. Do you even know?” She searches his face and her lips curl back. “For a witcher I didn’t expect you to be so dim as to not see the monster in front of-” she begins acidly. Jaskier wheezes and chokes. Geralt barks,

“He’s not a monster.” 

She rolls disbelieving eyes.

“Please-”

“He’s a genie.” His words stop her cold. “And he’s dying.” She says nothing, only examines him with those fantastic eyes. Why isn’t she doing anything? Geralt can feel his patience fraying. He steps closer, his heart between his gritted teeth. “Please.”

A moment of consideration and the stillness drops from her. She flies around him to the bedside. When he moves to follow, she snaps fingers at him without looking.

“You witchers make your own little potions and things. You can recognize magical herbs?”

“Yes.”

“Good. In the drawers behind you, I need you to bring me the following ingredients, and don’t ruin my organizational schema or you’ll kill him, do you understand?”

“What do you need?”

He fetches the herbs for her. Then a deep olive wood bowl, a coal brazier, a silver cauldron the size of a cook pot, mortar and pestle, various knives of different materials and sizes, a candle made from the fat of a griffin, and laurel oil. Whilst he hunts out her demands, he can feel the press and heave of magic in the air against his back. His pendant buzzes so hard the sensation moves up the chain into his jaw. He brings her the ingredients.

She suffers his looming presence as she works for all of thirty seconds before she snaps, “If you cannot do more than glower over me while I work, then I’d thank you to do so from the other side of the room. Or, preferably, the hall.” She meets his glare unflinchingly, hands still working. Geralt sucks in a breath, holds it, and forces himself to the other side of the bed. When she continues to glare, he kneels as if to meditate. He does, in fact, settle himself half into the state; it is the only way he can remain still.

She doesn’t order him away again. She works in harried silence for the next ten minutes. She pauses often in her burning, grinding, pasting, and cutting to pass a glowing hand through the air over Jaskier’s unmoving form. The strangeness of seeing him laid so low, still in a way he never is even when sleeping… Geralt settles further into the state. He allows his eyes to half-close and go blurry, listening to Jaskier’s heartbeat and the unsteady, gurgling pull of his breath. He feels as if he holds his panic beneath the surface, barely, thrashing.

On the other side of the bed, Yennefer of Vengerberg-- for that is her name, he saw it on the missive atop her desk as he searched-- probes the wild, chaotic tangle of magic and blood in the genie’s throat, only to find it is not alone. Another pulsing point of magic sits like a bird in the cage beneath his ribs and his diaphragm. Where she can see the light glowing red beneath the delicate skin of his throat, this fragment is banked, older; an ember compared to a bonfire.

In the nearly sacrosanct quiet of the sickroom, she asks curtly, “How many wishes?”

Geralt snaps from the semi-submerged state of his vigil only to press his lips together hard. She smiles secretly at his stony face. “A man who has made none would not balk. A man with only one left would bluster,” she reasons calmly, even as she returns to her potion making. “So. That means you’ve made one.” She watches him from beneath her lashes.

Seeing the observation, Geralt frowns deeply. “I made it years ago,” he says defensively. “It has nothing to do with this.”

If she has any thoughts on it (and Yennefer of Vengerberg, she always has a few), then she keeps them to herself. 

The paste she makes goes onto his chin and eyelids. She unbuttons his shirt to draw signs across the thin skin of his throat and through the hair downing his chest. Geralt watches tensely, his body a livewire of misgivings, as she follows the paste with careful drips of wax from the candle. 

“Hands off and stand back,” she commands. Geralt had curled his fists into the bedclothes at Jaskier’s hip. He hadn’t noticed. He rises to back a step at her motion. She begins to chant.

The hedgemage who had intended to force Geralt to swallow his own tongue had never wondered how such a spell might affect a creature of magic. Being now resoundingly dead, he never would. What Yennefer finds is that the magic had mutated when it struck the magic within the genie. 

Magic in ribbons and streams. For all his body is human, he feels made of the stuff, run through with it. She rakes her fingers through it with a sourness in her tight throat. It is more magic than a man should be able to contain and yet live. The spell flung in had tied the whole of it in knots, and Jaskier (for that is his name, though she did not know it) had had no choice but to swallow it down. Yennefer begins the process of ordering the different skeins apart.

The painted sigils glow with light. The little sun under Jaskier’s skin flares. She gives Geralt a warning glance almost before he has thought to step forward again and, quelled, he stays. 

It is slow work, but Yennefer for once does not mind the glacial pace. Not for something so _interesting_. She untangles the most of it, before as always is the fault of her long life curiosity gets the better of her. Yennefer’s hand drifts down from its place at his neck towards the magic in his belly. With the thinnest finger of her own chaos, she nudges it and finds a little whisper humming to itself under his last rib. In a flash of movement, long, artful fingers seize her wrist strongly enough that her bones creak. 

Geralt really does rush forward then, just in time to see what she does: her patient’s pallid face, the blood on his teeth as he gasps for air. His eyes flash with phantom sunlight. (Some part of her thrills to see it; the day is gray, there is no sun here.) “Not that,” he rasps in a voice echoing like in a harbor cave. Her eyes widen.

“Jaskier,” Geralt says at his side. But the genie’s, Jaskier’s, eyes have already closed. 

Carefully, Yennefer slips from his slack hold and returns to work with something new burning in her hungry belly. 

She had been curious. Now she is ravenous. 

When she is done, Yennefer settles him into the bed and meets the witcher’s gaze. Golden eyes, like a beast. She nods at the door.

They leave him sleeping. Geralt goes, surprisingly docile for the tales she has heard. Then again, witchers understand intimately the ritual of payment. He merely nods when she tells him, “Coin won’t be enough for this, witcher,” and his tight eyes say he had expected nothing less. It is her honest pleasure to watch them widen when she commands him to the bath. She will let him think what he will for the time being, if it gets him off his kilter. She will need him unsteady.

He bathes.

Some things do not change so much, even when lines that should have crossed before do so a couple years late. Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt of Rivia, after introductions have passed properly, speak of witchers and mutants. Because she is exactly who she is, Yennefer asks for the story as part of her payment and he tells that, too. 

As she speaks, Geralt finds he likes something about how she listens with bright, burning eyes. He likes the sharpness in her tone that even gauzy bath gowns cannot completely cushion. She is not afraid of him because she is stronger than him, more dangerous. In the presence of purple-eyed danger, he lets his guard down almost against his will. 

As he speaks, Yennefer enjoys the unusual mixture of his bluntness and begrudging respect almost against her will. He doesn’t look at her with the eyes of a man who gazes at something pretty, inane as a bauble. He has eyes as beast as the world is beastly and yet for a moment- a breath-- he sits in the steam with a softness she has never understood. She puts her back against his so he won’t see her smiles but only hear the blade of her voice. But she does smile.

In the end, she doesn’t bespell Geralt to punish her naysayers in town, for here she has none. Instead, she offers him clothing after the bath, and confirms the growing suspicion he had harbored in the steaming waters:

“We both know you don’t have the funds to pay for this, White Wolf,” she hums. It is with good humor, but it is not friendly. Nothing about her is ever friendly. “So as payment I will instead take your second wish.”

Even expecting it, his lip curls. He looms over her with the uneasy sensation that it is her who stands head and shoulders over him.

“And if I don’t give it to you?” he rumbles.

She chuckles. “Funny, finicky thing, that spell. There is a final knot in the curse. I tied it up neatly myself.” She walks bold fingers up his chest and chucks it under his chin; he jerks his head away. “It rests right here. Like a horsefly waiting to bite. One tug will undo all the tidying I’ve done.”

His hackles rise like a dog’s. “You heal him, and keep him your hostage.” 

“Don’t think me unkind. Once you make my wish, I will rid him of it completely. I will even leave you the third wish, with the promise that you will use it to no harm on my person or livelihood.” 

Geralt’s fists clench at his sides. She watches him struggle with a victorious eye and the smallest, pleased turn to her red lips. She knows, and he knows, that he will do what she says. It is merely the farce of formality when he nods.

“Good,” she murmurs. When she leans in close to press her lips to his ear and whisper her wish, the lilac and gooseberries smell of her hair engulfs him just as much as the smell of calendula and clove on his skin finds her.

This is how fate binds them together, because Destiny always gets its way: 

Jaskier wakes on the bed, Geralt knelt close and Yennefer too, with her hand on his neck. His eyes jump from Geralt’s pale face to her dagger-like gaze and under her palm his heart begins to throb double time. Jaskier has moved careless and confident through a world that cannot kill him on countless hunts and adventures. Yet in this moment he thinks perhaps he is more afraid of her than he has been of anything else since the amphora. He can’t take his eyes from hers; it’s like she holds them in her hands.

“Geralt,” he gasps. 

And then he feels it, crowding its way up his throat like a warning. His eyes snap around, though his head never moves from Yennefer’s hold-

It is meeting his eye that Geralt makes the wish. It buzzes between the three of them, the buzz of a badly pressed string against the fretboard. Jaskier’s head spins as, helpless, he finds magic crashing tidal through him from his chest to his hands, his feet, his head. He feels how this wish springs different from the first. She had probably coached Geralt in the words, wise to the ways of djinn and genies, even if Jaskier is and was a human first. So measured, so specific in overwhelming desire: the wish tastes of lilac and gooseberries even delivered from Geralt’s lungs. 

“I wish,” Geralt says, “for you to return Yennefer of Vengerberg her womb so that she might one day be mother to a child who will carry on her legacy.” 

The air of the room shifts as if a storm on the horizon has turned like a top, its massive gaze upon them. Jaskier sits up against her hold. 

Not even her fantastic strength can stop him. Yennefer follows him up, sweat standing out on her forehead. Her gaze unwavering on his is why she sees the moment something more finds its way into his eyes. 

Sometimes the best thing a flower can do for us is to die. Except. She watches the flower die in reverse. The physical weakness and pain that had pressed lines and wrinkles into the thin skin of his face slough off in the space of moments. She had felt the magic just beneath his skin, too great to be contained and yet pressed closer than his bones so that no hint of his nature showed through.

That nature slides out from beneath his human skin like a knife from its sheathe, if the knife can be all the power and depth of the seas, all the light of a sky filled with stars, every press and weight of every mountain in every land. She feels the sharpness and danger of it under her hand. Something too much made small. Still, she does not let go. 

In the way of any Great Thing, Jaskier looks into her eyes and knows with unshakable certainty that he cannot return to her her womb. He knows it in the same way he finds himself able to look through her eyes like looking through a door that becomes a window that becomes a door through which he steps through. Through it he knows her elven blood, tastes the individual thrum of her magic, like ball lightning. He hears the squeal of pigs. He tastes blood. He feels the shape of the truth carried inside her and how it warps the threads of destiny around her. 

It wasn’t taken away; it was given. Magic is fussy in that way. Persnickety. It is all intent. To give is the greatest act of fate, and when it tangles so many strings in the hands of Destiny then not even a genie can undo it. 

They may shift it, however. _How_ remains up to the entity in question.

Cruelty would be easy. But to do the work to fulfill the heart of the wish if not its very word...

Jaskier swallows the wish down to sit with its sibling. Even in the heart of this power, he still feels vulnerable beneath her hand. The wish scrapes his throat and the magic inside him raw on the way down just beneath her small brown hand. 

It is much more painful than when he kept Geralt’s first wish. Perhaps it is because this one he has not fulfilled, not even by his hands. It savages him on the way down, because a wish is intent. A wish reflects its wisher, and even though the words had come from Geralt’s mouth it is Yennefer’s desire which rakes its claws down his throat. He feels their shape-- yearning, pain, regret, loneliness, _such_ aching loneliness tinted with bloody-toothed rage. 

He takes the words and their impossibility, and he takes intent, twists them until they become something that exists not as a _can’t_ but as a _could._ He feels Fate thrum under his fingertips like a plucked chord on an unfamiliar instrument. Only when he is sure he has it does he nod to her. 

Slowly, unwavering, she presses her thumb to his Adam’s apple and murmurs a Word. 

He had thought her wish had burned through him. The final unraveling of the curse, unnoticed beneath, is like the excruciating bliss of a dislocated shoulder pressed back home. He gasps for air.

Instantly, Geralt’s hands find his back, his shoulder, unfamiliar for their uncertainty. When had he ever known Geralt to be uncertain? Even when Jaskier might have wished it of the pigheaded man?

In the still, Yennefer takes a step away from them. There is only the sound of his wheezing as he catches his breath. It is hard. Her wish presses, it fights, demands. He must--

“You’re well now, genie,” Yennefer tells him steely-eyed. If Geralt glares at her, she ignores it. Jaskier coughs a few times, winces, and concedes, to both of them but mostly to Geralt’s tightfisted concern,

“The spell is gone.” 

“Yes,” she drawls. “A happy day for you both, I’m sure.” 

All of the relief that had softened Geralt’s shoulders flees immediately back into tension. Jaskier knows- and grabs his arm. “Don’t,” he rasps. Geralt settles back on his heels slowly, hackles raised but to no violence. Yennefer watches as Jaskier swings his bare feet over the side of her bed with a pinched expression.

“Well?” she asks. 

He takes a brief moment to take stock; his missing jacket and boots, his chemise half undone and as crusted with blood as his front. He can see that she has some smudged on her hand when she crosses her arms over her chest and shifts impatiently. At that he stares. It is a strange juxtaposition to her elegance, this short-tempered impatience. It gives her the air of a child with an outstretched hand, wanting what has been denied.

She scowls as if she hears his thoughts. “Do it. Grant my wish.”

With Geralt’s help, Jaskier stands. Fire throbs in his chest, more painful by the moment. He has no choice, he knows, but first, 

“Well, since you’ve asked so nicely,” he huffs with a roll of his eyes. The surprise in her face, quickly becoming rage, is worth it. Before she can lob whatever cutting thing he sees her composing, he takes a deep breath and

changes. Imperceptibly, so that no one who looked at him could say how. Jaskier stands in his bloody shirt, dark hair rumpled from bed and the night-long ride on horseback, and the blue of his eyes is as it has always been. All the same, he 

He is no more or less what he was before. It is more that the truth of what he is unspools. A great distance opens up inside and around him yet he stands exactly where he does, his bare feet sunk into the thick rugs of Yennefer’s chamber. 

Geralt feels the crawl of magic under his skin and winces, but doesn’t let go of his hold on Jaskier’s shoulders. Jaskier straightens into it even as coolness settles across his skin. A breeze like off a summer lake brushes his hair on his forehead. 

He lifts a questing hand out before him. He sees not the room, nor Yennefer’s ravenous gaze swallowing in light and dark alike. His fingers quest through the air across strings and threads only he can feel. 

He brushes through them once, twice. The only concession of his humanity, sweat comes out on his brow at the strain of what howls and sings through him. He reaches,

and then his finger snags, just a moment.

A thread, like spider silk. He catches it up. It slides between his thumb and forefinger finer than anything. It trembles like something young it flutters like a child’s heart it 

He knows with surety whose it is. It pipes its story to him in a heartbeat. 

Yennefer may have made the wish, but it had passed through Geralt first, and Fate never forgot whom it touched in its path. Threads under the shuttle. All it takes is the smallest touch to shift it-- not far, not a tangle or a tear, just a realignment. Jaskier takes in a breath that still tastes of his own blood and breathes out a hum that has nothing to do with his healing throat. The thread vibrates in the same sound, sharp, sharper, until it whines and cuts the skin of his fingers like the finest blade. Still he holds, a human touching what he should not be able to. 

Jaskier feels Geralt tense under the palm he had placed, at some point, to the center of his chest. He must be able to smell the blood before he sees it. Jaskier can’t pause to reassure him. He focuses on the string. A tapestry, a weave, is all fine and good, for those who weave.

Jaskier is a bard, however, and knows every string will sing when plucked right.

He won’t remember later what melody bubbles up out of his throat. He sings something which strikes through Geralt of Rivia like the belling of copper under a forge hammer, something which chimes through Yennefer of Vengerberg like the crystal blade she has honed herself into. He sings out until the thread vibrates against the bone of his thumb (and if there is pain, he doesn’t feel it) and the three vibrate as one in a terrible, awesome harmony. The world shifts a hair to the left. 

Geralt covers his ears. Even Yennefer flinches. The curtains about the bed toss and tear. The stone of the house judders as it becomes more solid, less solid, more and less real around them. The smell of woodsmoke, snow, and spruce fills the space as Jaskier’s voice drifts up through melodies and sounds outside of human music and into something older. So overcome, unbecome, remade by the music as he directs the magic through its greatest height-- for a moment, Jaskier forgets who he is. What he is. He has no name, no identity. He was never a man born. The past, present, and future blur out of meaning as their lines entangle, the lie of their separation undone.

In the last second, with the final note on his tongue and magic settling around them all, he just barely remembers himself, and he pauses.

The sound of the air fades. Piecemeal, in measures, Jaskier comes into his human body once more and, with a flicker of foreknowledge, swallows the final note down. 

Geralt’s wish sits like an ember, a banked warmth, something that was painful but became comfortable with time. Now it feels as comforting as a promise. 

This slides down like a shard of ice; the unfinished finale, a space left in the final measure purposefully incomplete. A gap just big enough for possibility and the unknown to creep through. The little ice in his throat hums potentiality. He doesn’t know what it will become. He just knows that something told him to keep it for himself. 

He swallows it. When it slides down and settles in the vicinity of his heart, he smiles.

The hum in the air fades. Yennefer immediately flares with pearlescent, shimmering light. Her hand falls to her stomach. Her face crumples. Jaskier gives in to the urge to look away from the display of vulnerability, knowing somehow that she wouldn’t want him to see. 

“Nothing’s changed,” she accuses. Something in her face shifts. 

Geralt grabs him and shoves him behind just in time. His hands surge with a Sign, and a terrible, burning, angry flash of magic breaks over the shield surrounding them. When the lights fade, Yennefer screams a harpy-eagle high sound of rage. “We had a deal!” she shrieks. “You were meant to grant my wish, genie! My womb-”

“-cannot be returned,” Jaskier tells her. And though he shouldn’t be able to avoids Geralt’s hands when he goes to grab him. 

He steps around him to meet Yennefer’s smoldering, furious gaze head on, for all his heart’s uptick reminds him of lingering fear. He has to remind himself that she is a candle next to him as he is now, with a wish full in his belly, another in his chest, and the lingering possibility of the third. That Possibility imbues him with so much that he feels sure every mage of the Brotherhood could stand against him and still never budge him from his path. Not if he was ready. Not if he still had that third wish waiting inside him. (There’s always been something of that number. The magic of three.)

From the way she looks at him, she would try anyway. He shakes his head.

“I felt that thread," he tries, and tries to press into his voice the sympathy she deserved. "Old magic may have taken it from you, but not before it was freely given.”

Her hands tighten into fists, as if his softness cuts her.

“It should never have been asked of me,” she snarls, and yet even in the height of emotion her voice is sharp and clear. “It shouldn’t be asked of any of us! They take weak, terrified, _stupid_ little girls and break them into new, sharp shapes that the world has not been creative enough to do on its own time. They turn us into weapons that they can wield. Only if we are strong enough, of course. Only if our gratitude is great enough and our ambition fierce enough to turn us desperate. Only if we are so starved to be the beautiful dream so dearly sold to us that we would buy it with our own bodies.” Her voice cracks across the room in a final shout. Jaskier steps forward, waves a quieting hand when Geralt snaps behind him, “Jaskier!” He steps through the fierce curls and waves of light coming off of her without appearing to notice them, whereas they might have flayed the skin off a normal person.

“It shouldn’t have been asked of you,” he agrees. The truth of it is heavy in his mouth even as she sneers at him. He doesn’t step back through the little eddying creek of time-- can’t, anymore, the amphora had broken too long ago, the pour scattered-- but he does glimpse it, on occasion. Yennefer flickers before his eyes like water image, and yes, there had been blood. He doesn’t know how everyone doesn’t taste it on the air when she enters a room. “But I can’t mend that fault. I can only grant the wish I can grant. And I have.”

Their eyes meet. For the longest moment, they meet.

"I've granted your wish."

The bright burning goes out of her eyes, disappearing behind a frigid mask.

In the end, Yennefer sees them out of her home under a wary truce, for all she cannot hide how she wants them gone. (Given the way Jaskier, seemingly fully recovered, babbles valiantly to her silent air of disdain, Geralt isn't sure he can blame her.) Jaskier feels the string of fate that has connected all of them, shivering between them. He thinks by the way neither of them react that they musn't. He burns through the residual energy of the wish with his unfailing wit, and nearly crows in victory when the mage finally breaks her prickly silence to snap at him. Given the bare chance to wash at the basin before their removal, Jaskier daubs and primps himself without pausing for breath, and barely has his boots on before Geralt has his by the arm and tows him down the stairs.

As they leave, whilst Geralt digs through one of Roach's packs for a canteen of fortified wine as if Jaskier were still fainting, Yennefer approaches him a final time.

"He recovers quickly," she remarks quickly. "Perhaps I should have let the spell go a bit longer and relieved you of his voice," she muses.

Geralt has the unfortunate failing of becoming overly cross when recently sleepless, and still tense with the fear and desperation of the last day's and night's ride to save Jaskier, is more than cross. Between one blink and the next, he finds himself turned, hand a bruising circle around her soft arm. Startled, she hisses.

Not just startled. He pulls away sharply only to find blood on his palm and the amphora shard dropping to the gravel between them. A thin line scored across her forearm oozes blood sluggishly.

"What the fuck?" she says, temper flaring. "What did you do?"

"I didn't-" he begins to say, and bites off with a wince. His forearm, when lifted and turned to the light, bleeds in a single line beneath the scab-scar he had barely thought of in the past few months. They stare, but it doesn't change: their cuts rest in the same place, identical.

They do not converse after that. Geralt shoves the wineskin into his hands and practically hauls Jaskier up onto Roach's back with him, and says nothing to his litany of complaints and declarations of gratitude and questions as to his out-of-character behavior. Disgruntled, Geralt leads them away as a brisk pace. He doesn't say farewell, and Yennefer doesn't wish them safe travels. She stands with her hand sealed over the bleeding cut and watches them go.

It bleeds for three days and a fourth night before Jaskier finally convinces Geralt to let him dress it properly with a salve. This one heals quickly after, silver as wire. It matches the ones that heal on the pads of Jaskier’s thumb and pointer. Sometimes, he wonders if it matches the one on the arm of Yennefer of Vengerberg, wherever she travels.

Sometimes Geralt thinks he feels a heartbeat in it; sometimes two of them.

Jaskier knows he feels them. Three of them.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of my favorite scenes for this entire fic :) 
> 
> Do I capitalize too many words to show How Important They Are? yes. yes I do. And I won't stop. Because this is _my_ self indulgent, over the top fairytale fic and I shall do as I like.
> 
> Let me know what you think! How is this for explaining how Yennefer meets them and how fate comes to bind her and Geralt even in this timeline? How was it seeing Jaskier vulnerable after the last few chapters? Is this style for writing _too much_??
> 
> Thanks for reading everyone!


	8. Chapter 8

*

For all the weight of what happened, two wishes hanging now between them, nothing much changes.

They travel together, and then apart for a time. It is on one such long stretch by himself with Jaskier gone for that yearly bardic competition of his that Geralt jolts with realization. 

The next time he sees Jaskier, in the pallid early spring near some misbegotten hamlet in Cairgorn of all places, the first thing he asks is, 

“Shouldn’t you be bound to me?” 

Jaskier raises an unimpressed brow and snips, “Hello to you, too, I’m doing well, thanks for asking, and _yes_ I did win the competition-- by a landslide, if the crowds are to be believed and in this case I believe they are. Have you even heard the miserable piece Valdo Marx tried to pass off in the third round?” He goes on to describe it in loatheful detail all the way to the tavern, and then doesn’t address his question. Frustrated but stymied, Geralt bites his tongue. When Jaskier gets up in arms about his manners, or lack there of, there is very little that can be done to turn him aside of his goal. Better to let him talk himself out. 

They get drinks, they eat together, wine and dine and catch up into the night. But Jaskier doesn’t acknowledge his question. Not until the end of the evening. Not until after he has caught Geralt up on all the courtly gossip that he doesn’t care to hear, and Geralt has told him of the past few jobs that had brought in just enough coin to live and two new scars on his already battered body. Jaskier listens and talks with equal fervor, and dogs him mercilessly for details until Geralt hmm’s enough to turn aside even his legendary stubbornness. 

Temporarily, of course. Jaskier never stops. Which is why it is the strangest thing when in the following lull he goes still. There is an almost unprecedented look in his eyes, a man staring inward not at the light of inspiration but as if into a dark cave. Geralt stills across from him, every sense pricking. 

“I am,” Jaskier says quietly.

Geralt looks at him, really looks. He has seen a good run of it recently. Spring is a good time for him. The nobles and royalty of various kingdoms throw their fêtes and parties to cast off the winter, and they all want only the brightest, most energetic of performers. Jaskier seems to exude the joy of spring from his person when he speaks but most especially when he sings. It is most obvious now, in his silk tunics embroidered with crocuses and new growth so green it dazzles. Or, it should. But looking at him as still as some kind of mourning, Geralt feels uneasy. He shakes his head before Jaskier has even finished speaking. 

“We go months apart. I was in Lyria while you were in Cidaris.” He doesn’t know why he is so intent. Frustrated, even. He raps the table top. “That’s a distance of-” 

“You may have broken the amphora, Geralt, but I’m still as bound as I was when I was in the bottle.” Jaskier’s voice is so patient, so even. He touches Geralt’s arm. Geralt draws back sharply, flashing teeth.

“You’re not in one now.”

Jaskier smiles just softly enough that his eyes don’t twinkle.

“Perhaps this bottle is simply bigger.”

*


	9. Chapter 9

The talk of contracts and amphorae-- it discontents him for a while. Geralt can't shake the tension.

They part for a stint, yet when Geralt and Jaskier happen upon each other again he can’t hold on to that discomfort. The familiarity and relief of traveling together is too great.

Geralt is surprised when things don’t change. They continue to travel, and as they do they bicker, or joke. Sometimes they debate the world as it changes and stays ultimately the same. They have such differing world views it almost always ends in drinking. 

They eat together. In taverns when they can, or whatever they can hunt and scavenge up on the roads. Geralt hunts best, but Jaskier has always been able to charm any fish onto his line. 

They get kicked out of taverns and towns together. In other places they are welcomed as heroes and shown the greatest gratitude for a night with the best vittles and wines. Jaskier is recognized in many places, reminded Geralt anew each time that he is a bard of great renown. Only most of the time is this a good thing.

They travel, and not much has changed. Even so, Geralt can’t get over the change to Jaskier’s scent.

He had smelt so human, before. Warm, of sweat and sweet wines and all the things he carries with him to care for his instrument and his hair and his skin. After the amphora is broken, his scent is almost consumed by the smell of clay and cool water, of lakefront grasses in the sun. Even in the middle of winter, in drought-stricken farmlands, it follows him as strongly as if some part of him were always there, on the lakefront near Rinde. 

It only grows stronger when he uses magic.

He is a human, full cheeked, handsome for his smiles and easy friendliness. He is human, and there isn’t a sniff of magic about him. As magical as shoe leather-- until Geralt is in danger. Then, the smell of clay overcomes him like a fresh tomb torn open, and the magic that spills out of him smells sharper than lightning and raises every hair on Geralt’s body.

He grows used again to his scent, in measures. A man with a wish he has no intention of making, he allows himself to forget. He desires it like a parched man desires water, and does not look at why.

They travel. They don't speak of this- thing -often.

Geralt would not think about it often, if he could. But as is the failing of all who have a genie bound to them, Geralt at times remembers violently what he has in his hand (always, smudged there, a ghost of a seal, a contract), and it strikes him with weight, the remembering, and fear rips through his throat. He does not recognize this fear.

He does recognize opportunity and longing swallowed painfully down.

He thinks he does not show it. But then, one evening, 

They travel. Geralt doesn’t make any more wishes after his first or the second which he had traded for Jaskier's life. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t think of them. The life of a witcher is what it is. Hardship finds him more often than not. Not even the emotionless warrior he so attempts to be could be immune to temptation. When the road is particularly long, the monster dangerous, the village hollow-cheeked and joyless, he finds himself thinking, _I wish--_

Not often. Witchers are not prone to dreaming, and wishes have always been less than nothing to him. But those rare times...

And sometimes he fears-- on an evening not unlike dozens of others, in a tavern in Toussaint, whilst caught in their usual trading of verbal parries and ripostes, this time over where they should like to go next. Geralt takes exception, as he often does, to Jaskier's overabundance of words and how he applies them so freely, and Jaskier takes exception to his exception, and in a lighthearted squabble over what a man should _like_ and whether a witcher should _like_ anything at all, Geralt tells him that what he should really _like_ is for Jaskier to pass him the wine, for his cup has gone dry. Another bard plays that Jaskier had seemed pleased to hear. The common in early autumn is warm and bright and painted so brightly in Toussaint fashion.

Yet a ridiculous flash of fear finds him, hand outstretched, as adrenaline floods his chest. He knows it doesn’t show on his face. It mustn’t. He is too practiced. But for an absurd moment, he thinks of his third wish and wonders _did I just-_ in between the hard, slow beats of his heart.

His face does not twitch. Still, Jaskier beams as if he has told a joke and laughs. The wine pitcher lands in his limp outstretched palm. 

“It takes more than a request to make your wish, Geralt,” Jaskier chuckles. Geralt pours into his mug by rote, shoulders tense with his immense discomfort. Jaskier snickers into his cup, eyebrows dancing above its rim. “It’s as much about the intensity of the feeling behind the wish as it is the wish itself.” 

Something about it sours him. Geralt takes a heavy swallow and grunts. “If you go by the word of humans, witchers don’t have feelings.” 

It only makes Jaskier smile ruefully, still just as boyish, just as flushed, as that first day, the day they met fifteen years after they met. His words come shockingly sober for a moment.

“I have learned my lesson by the words of humans too well to trust them for anything like truth.” The mood leaves him just as quickly. “And you forget.” He taps Geralt’s hand, the one with the shimmering ghost of a lead seal smudged into it regardless of what gore or grime or soap finds its way there. “You hold the seal. I’m bound to you." His smile goes teasing. He says with the greatest amusement, "I feel each wish that wells up in your throat and which you swallow back down as if it were bile.” 

Geralt shifts uncomfortably. He doesn’t like conversations of emotions, and even less does he like it when Jaskier mentions that word-- bound. He has only spoken of it once or twice before. Each time, the flash of guilt that goes through him is poisonous. It has spurs. 

Beside him, unaware, Jaskier drains his mead. His eyes are always like a blue sky at sunset. Blueness hanging low. Eyes that pull in milkmaids and stablehands and admirers who cannot explain why the bard’s gaze never dims in the smokiest of tavern commons, not for a moment. 

They spend a few minutes in a familiar enough kind of comfortable silence that Geralt feels himself begin to unwind. He listens to the bard and admires her play of words. As does the rest of the tavern, he notes.

It is so unsuspecting that he barely hears Jaskier murmur. “Perhaps it is not a bottle, after all,” he muses to himself. Geralt turns. His gaze has gone momentarily distant, staring down at Geralt's hand where it rests atop the table. It is not a common expression for him. The noise of the common ebbs, held at a distance. He thinks of asking.

The spell breaks. From a quiet that has pressed up against his throat like a threat, Jaskier shakes himself and with ease chatters brightly on to a new topic, and he won’t explain even when Geralt prods him.

The look in his eyes; the weight of those few words. Geralt would not think about if often, if he could, but he is a witcher with many failings.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two short chapters! A little exploration of their time together now, as they settle in to new territory. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoy! Please let me know what you think :)


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